A Low-Overhead Secure Communication Framework for an Inter-cloud Environment

Most of the current cloud computing platforms offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, which aims to provision basic virtualized computing resources as on-demand and dynamic services. Nevertheless, a single cloud provider may not have limitless resources to offer to its users, hence the notion of an Inter-Cloud environment where a cloud can use the infrastructure resources of other clouds. However, there is no common framework in existence that allows the service owners to seamlessly provision even some basic services across multiple cloud service providers, albeit not due to any inherent incompatibility or proprietary nature of the foundation technologies on which these cloud platforms are built. In this paper we present a novel solution which aims to cover a gap in a subsection of this problem domain. Our solution offers a security architecture that enables service owners to provision a dynamic and service-oriented secure virtual private network on top of multiple cloud IaaS providers. It does this by leveraging the scalability, robustness and flexibility of peer-to-peer overlay techniques to eliminate the manual configuration, key management and peer churn problems encountered in setting up the secure communication channels dynamically, between different components of a typical service that is deployed on multiple clouds. We present the implementation details of our solution as well as experimental results detailing the overheads of our solution carried out on two commercial clouds.